How to properly document programming languages?

Posted by roydukkey on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by roydukkey
Published on 2010-03-20T19:24:58Z Indexed on 2010/03/20 19:31 UTC
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documentation

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best-practices

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standards

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coding-standards

Where can I find information on how to properly document a programming language? What I mean is that there seems to be a standard way to document code. php.net and api.jquery.com seem to document there code the a similar way. For example, the trim() description on php.net.

string trim  (  string $str  [,  string $charlist  ] )

And likewise on jquery.com

.animate( properties, [ duration ], [ easing ], [ callback ] )

Does anyone even know what this syntax is called?

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